Wheel's On Fire - unicycle hockey

Hockey Digest, March, 2001 by Chuck O'Donnell

Unicycle hockey players all over the world are having a wheel good time, and wish you were, too

They converge every Thursday night in the fall and winter on the Cordella public school in Toronto. It's the highlight of the week for these movie camera repairmen, students, Website designers, teachers, and others who put the world on hold, put the nets in place, pick up the sticks, and throw down the ball.

Sounds like another pickup game of deck hockey or floor hockey? Well, yes and no.

It is floor hockey, but the Toronto Unicyclists hockey team puts a unique spin on a sport in which "cycling" is a term that isn't usually meant in a literal sense. Perched precariously atop one wheel, trying to negotiate a street hockey ball or a tennis ball across a gym floor, the action is non-stop.

Having trouble visualizing this? Think of it as the X Games meets Wayne Gretzky. The Ringling Brothers meet the Hanson Brothers. The high-wire act meets the leftwing lock. BMX meets the NHI.

Think of it fast and furious fun played with some real gusto. "It's really fast-paced," says Darren Bedford, a member of the club since it was founded in 1987 by unicyclists who were looking to try something a little different. "There are a lot of collisions. You may turn to look for the ball, not see where you're going, and run into someone. You can't always instantly stop on a unicycle. The maneuverability [on unicycles] is harder [than on ice skates]."

In the beginning, Bedford's crew, believed to be the longest-running club in North America, would play on the playground outside. They would spend a few hours just shoveling off the snow until "we were almost too tired to play," he says. Surprised people would stop and ogle. "Most of the feedback we have had has been very positive," says Bedford, whose club has about a dozen members between the ages of 10 and 60. "People would stop and see what we were up to. They were a bit curious. A lot of them couldn't believe it was possible to do all that [while riding a unicycle]." They've since found it easier, and a lot less strenuous, to rent space in the school's gym.

And although the Toronto townspeople can't wander by and watch, they would probably be shocked to learn that unicycle hockey has been played in several countries across the globe for several years.

For instance, at the 2000 world championships held in August in Beijing, China, 20 teams from nine countries--Denmark, France, China, Great Britain, Japan, Switzerland, Puerto Rico, the United States, and Germany--competed.

Unicycle hockey may be most popular in England and Germany, the only two countries to have national leagues. The sport seems to be taking off in Germany, in particular, where 26 teams compete in the national league. It is also home to the world champs, LAHIMO, which crushed the Twin City Unicycle Club of Minnesota, 23-2, in the tournament final.

"LAHIMO started playing in 1985, so they have a lot of experience," says Rolf Sander, a former LAHIMO member who now plays for RADLOS of Frankfurt. "They have been by far the strongest team for quite a while but now there are some other very good teams in Germany. I have to admit that LAHIMO was quite lucky that these other clubs did not send their complete teams to the world championships in China this year."

Sander has gone from just a unicycle hockey player to an amateur historian of the sport. The earliest mention of the sport he has been able to uncover dates back to 1925, when a silent German movie called "Variete" shows "a short scene with two unicyclists performing on a stage. One has a hockey stick, the other is swinging a walking stick. They have tiny goals and they use something like a crumpled towel as a ball."

The first reference he has found to unicycle hockey in the United States goes back to 1960, when an article in The Bicycle Journal mentioned the Albuquerque Unicycle Club of New Mexico had taken up the sport.

Sander says, however, that the grandfather of the unicycle clubs was Wheel People, a group that formed in California in 1976. Playing under the golden sunshine, they were trailblazers in the sport, forming many of the rules by which the game is played today. The club disbanded in the mid-1980s, but not before it was joined by other major clubs in North America such as Harvey Mudd College Gonzo Unicycle Madness in California and Association de Monocycle de Quebec in Quebec City.

Many of the rules seem to be enforced universally. You can't take part in the play unless you're on top of your unicycle. So if you fall off, you have to get back on before continuing. At the beginning of the game and after each goal, all players go to their own half of the surface where play resumes as soon as a player of the team in possession crosses the center line. And if you knock the ball out of the playing surface, a player from the other team brings it back in from the point of exit.

But other rules differ from club to club. For instance, the German teams play with goalies, using a larger net. The Toronto Unicyclists don't use a goalie, per se, although one of the four or five players on a side can go back and defend the net. Consequently, they use a smaller net, about 12 inches high by 18 inches wide. The Germans use your average ice hockey stick, while the Toronto crew uses street hockey sticks with plastic blades.